Despite chronic storm threats and occasional drops of actual rain, a brown tide has crept across the region's landscape.
While that may signal the onset of a drought, the fact that the dryness has been so noticeable underscores a remarkable period in Philadelphia's weather history.
Very simply, we're not used to these brown-outs.
For the first half of the year, Philadelphia's precipitation was about two inches below normal, and if that trend continues, it will end an unprecedented wet streak.
Last year was Philadelphia's fifth straight with above-average rainfall, the first time that has happened in the 134 years of recordkeeping.
That's extraordinary, even though the Northeastern United States, close to the ocean and along busy storm tracks, is in one of the world's more-reliable rain belts.
While from 1980 to 2002 the Philadelphia region was in some state of drought 30 percent of the time, it has been more than six years since the last serious dry spell.
"This has been the anti-drought," said Gary Szatkowski, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service office in Mount Holly.
That could be changing.
During the last several weeks, rainfall deficits have been growing subtly across parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The results are evident to farmers. Some of them were shut out of their fields by mud during a rainy spring, and now they find that a drying sun is making hay a bumper crop.
"The grass is turning brown quickly, and crops are starting to show some drought stress," said Judy Behney of the Adams County Farm Services Agency, in the heart of Pennsylvania farm country.
"What we are seeing in the beginning of July is usually what we see in mid-August," said Christopher Palmer, operations and landscape management director of maintenance for Philadelphia's Fairmount Park system.
The hit-and-mostly-miss thunderstorms last week haven't been much help to the 9,200-acre park system's foliage, which is scattered from deep South Philadelphia to the Far Northeast.
Meteorologists attribute the dryness to an atmosphere that has been as capricious as a thunderstorm. In summer, when the sun's energy is spread most evenly across the Northern Hemisphere, the temperature contrasts that drive storm systems are weak, so rain tends to be less organized.
